Paean to Bicillin L-A® and the End of Harry Barlow's
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Paean to Bicillin L-A® and the End of Harry Barlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments Peggy Munson [email protected] [But] thanks to Harlow and his colleagues in the study of attachment, we have been humanized—we possess an entire science of touch, and some of this came from cruelty. There’s the paradox. —Lauren Slater, “Monkey love,” The Boston Globe, 21 March 2004. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so— but this is surely the way fascism can begin. —David Remnick, on Donald Trump, “An American Tragedy,” The New Yorker, 9 November 2016 I was in Harry Harlow's “Pit of Despair,” that walled isolation chamber with a one-way mirror: spent months there, rocking like a horse turned wooden by the blank stare of a mute whisperer into part of an attic’s unaccounted boneyard. I do know how it feels to suckle at a wire mother, because a tin mom’s teleprompter was the script given me by captors whose transgenic faces tarred my raptor-feathered fight. Isolation, that velvet rope of triage that cannot be deveined, spelled out America’s subliminal apartheids like a bride’s soft skin that lives within her hardened marriage. I started off homebound, a leitmotif of the Mandela Effect, once a latchkey kid, keyed up in the collective amygdala, Munson, Peggy. (2020). Paean to Bicillin L-A® and the end of Harry Barlow’s rhesus monkey Experiments. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 6(1), page 1-12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Peggy Munson, 2020 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Critical Perspectives then gently cordoned off the way a capsized crew is threaded off from where they tread together until one of them goes lost. Later, I was rigid as the monkey huddled in a corner, egg-eyed like the tempest of an anthropomorphic psychosis that society sections away. That monkey’s mutagenic life became the DNA of all human cruelty. I pined for touch while the chemical cartel nudged me with its ammonia waves, and even now, I cry for the word felt. Felt mother, how I longed to feel mothered. I sensed my ancestors near as I was dying there, on a cold bathroom floor. My mother had abandoned me, in such inoculating heat from Tuskegee. Experimental machinations pushed my hem to the heavens. What you done in the dark sure come to the light. Blighted starlight through the tiny window I could not stand up to reach. Like a hunchback child kept in a four-foot-high basement, or the muteness pounded by a venal gavel into the mouth of each woman whose abuse is denied, I was just too weak to speak. The miscreant who put monkeys on “rape racks” taught us motherly touch was broader than milking at a celestial maw, our similarly Simian DNA a common tree of Syngenta and Ciba-Geigy, borne of Swiss notions of neutrality plunked proximal to our maddened Germany. Ciba first pigmented clothes, making arsenic Green, so before this nothing was unbleached, before Harlow our cloth mothers sewed a flowery sack-dress from flour. Grandma said simply, You wore what you had, as young Harlow in Iowa sketched winged creatures in his imaginary land Yazoo, then vivisected them violently with lines. Flat latitudes, we noted of the echolocating expanse, were seamed with unreachable simplicity. It may be that proximity is all that you know of love Harlow chided. So, we courted collision, divisibly Midwestern, depressed from Atrazine, our stewed Prairie Madness 2 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Peggy Munson, 2020 Critical Perspectives soon calcified in milk teats, metastasizing into brains in my unassuming block, spiralizing the DNA of cornstalks that is more complicated than human or monkey. Corn has the genome of not running away, a racked realism. Because, says science, corn has to stay put. I thank God I have not been so deprived. Outside the gallows of cloth pelts, the spiralized germs climbed the collective neck as a borrelia spirochete that started the neurological twitch, idea-like, behind my eye. History is limited by the lexicographer’s sty so that pure experience and the sailor’s cure are as unreachable as Oscar Wilde’s fainting chair from which the pulse of a syphilitic miasm propelled this theatrical democracy into costumed Darwinian eugenics. Project Paperclip fastened us all to pathogens from which Peoria Lab Penicillin would set us free. Raunchy beats led me to Peoria, my sister and I two of few white girls at a funk concert there. We danced where the Missouri and Mighty Mississippi met to dump pesticides into a cancer cluster that later struck her. Penicillin was first made on corn-steep liquid from local farms there so that by D-Day, troops had their shots, a wonder drug for Wunderkind. Farmers, invested in the wartime cog, and proud of their penicillium corn, bought nitrogen from bombs, and DDT for their crops. Now, like a trial-by-drowning witch, I only Have that Get-Down-On-It twitch Like the high whine of pride and its insecticide. The cremains of my life's gyrations shaken down from a statue of a life. My sister once said I could be zebra and she would be monkey, iconoclast to her monkey mind, I was that dialect from exile, body-dialectical, before my sister lost her breast then-incommunicado to my illness, 3 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Peggy Munson, 2020 Critical Perspectives our girlhood shirked in shucked husk dolls. An Axis Mundi of Atrazine and Paxil, she replied tersely, stole her flesh, while she regulated earth and euphoria. Now I take my penicillin shot for neuro Lyme riddled by the neurotoxic moonshine that flows as free as cornstalks marching quietly around my GMO-laced city, Mitsubishi’s first electric car town near where Mad Hatter rage from Lincoln’s Blue Mass pills spit out a blue planet like a lead plug to house milliners who would never be millionaires and the myoclonic start of beggar's subways below the green peace of death, with an iron-on ideology and one ribald eyeball staring out of a Masonic dollar. Zebra melts into my ashen face, a grayed area Found on Google cartography, medicine’s improbable diagnosis defying Occam. Sprayed skies collapsing into New Games parachutes, as my mailman’s detergent conjuring Zyklon B deeply sickens me. I haven't seen anyone in weeks. They call this limbic kindling, as in It Only Takes a Spark To Get a Fire Going, our Sunday School song about giving away God, as if diluted sameness that should end already, will shake the exoplasmic ego away. Children of Lyme, Connecticut don’t look like teetotalers now, but Van Gogh when the night got in his brain. Their hyperacuity threatens national security. The flight pattern of Plum Island birds ends around swingsets that carved smiles in the afternoon air. It’s crayon biowarfare, those poor little monkeys, where Nancy Lanza counts yard-roaming deer before, before, every evening before, the Ixodes ticks on crisp Newtown grass, Dr. Charles Jones defends himself to the Medical Boards, as the FDA rations antibiotics like curative mold withheld from poor black men of Tuskegee. 4 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Peggy Munson, 2020 Critical Perspectives The poor black men of Tuskegee were reduced to symbols of the disease process of white supremacy that fanned out quietly through the tumorous nurseries and tumorous suburbs and tumorous white flight exploding into a hyper-white aircraft that sprayed a sick mist over my friend's land and drove her into a temporal seizure that started with the A-bomb researcher in Michigan feeding her radiation as a child when she was Human Subject Number 423. The cure was this paean to Bicillin, raunchy mold on corn steep. Proxemics, Josie, I say, watching a video where the cheerleader near Peoria huddles with a cursing Dad under her home as an EF4 pulverizes it. He shouts nails or other fright-words, flushing her from the timid hole— their dream kitchen dashed to smithereens. She’s shrilling Omigod Omigod our demigoddess Dorothy, past an untouched, illusory large-screen TV, insulation draped like congratulations streamers, staircase freestanding on grass, Dad’s “Holy shit” as shocked prayer, there in Washington, Where our Vorticist was a Fascist, what Plath said every woman adores: making luminous literata into imagistes, as if overexposed “children of the sun,” their deepest palimpsest undone. Feminist confessionals became ovens, before “It Gets Better,” oh lyrical Lymie Heather, her “It Gets Better” speech stopped when she flung herself before a train. The SS Entomological Institute’s paranoid pesticides preventing tick warfare, then all of it hatching into the same symbolic nymph. Recombining in John Deere combines trolling once-swamped malarial fields: this gathered, hard-fracked hem. Now the hymn-drum of stimming Indigo kids where Brucella-laced bison roam Standing Rock, 5 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience Issue 6 (Vol 1) Peggy Munson, 2020 Critical Perspectives where Grandma succumbed to the Rorschach plaques, where Solar Civilizations still solicit sundown towns, where Flint is the garbage fire going. Who is the Vorticist-Fascist? We can’t de-cipher this spin. It’s bad, Josie, says Dad, to his post-Apocalyptic, just another day. Josie, come on now. I know it’s scary, come on now. Josie, we gotta get outside where it’s safe. Our house is freakin’ destroyed. She climbs from the smashed dollhouse to the Russian Doll Cocktail, with the Mighty Mississippi oxbowing to nearby Nauvoo, harkening proximity to these tainted morphologies of mergers through history: she tilts toward the windmilled chem-sky, toward the histo-soil, as insect people emerge seeking palliative, chimeric saliency.